God’s dice: Randomness can have purpose
When Charles Darwin declared that evolutionary variations occur by chance, many of his contemporaries were alarmed, worrying about the implications of chance for people’s belief in the God who designed the world. The very mention of chance in the mid-19th century hinted at a godless universe.
In the early 20th century, chance began to play a key role in physics too. In 1928 a group of physicists centered in Denmark formulated the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which stated that elementary particles possess a fundamentally indeterminate nature. Albert Einstein had significant misgivings about such claims for indeterminacy, and he famously expressed these by saying, “God does not play dice.” Einstein made this remark too often for Niels Bohr, one of the Copenhagen group, who retorted, “Albert, stop telling God what to do.”
Western science and religion long assumed that we live in a coherent world that can be understood. Classical Christian thinkers argued that the order, harmony, and beauty of the world clearly point to a designer. The existence of randomness in biology and physics has undermined such arguments for many people.
